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Data Privacy Notice

Information applicable to all Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade customers.

The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade is fully committed to keeping all personal data submitted by its customers, safe and secure during administrative processes. All necessary technical measures have been put in place to ensure the safety and security of the systems which hold this data.

Transparency and openness in the use of personal data held is important to the Department and therefore we aim to fully inform all our customers about the purpose(s) for which their data will be used and why, where it may be shared elsewhere and why and how long their data may be held by the Department. Information on the rights of the customers will also be provided.

The current legislation for Data Protection in Ireland is the Data Protection Acts 1988 - 2018 and the General Data Protection Regulations (EU 2016/679). The Data Controller for the collection and processing of all personal data in the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade is the Department itself, as a legal entity.

Personal data processed by the Department will only be used for the specific purpose(s) as outlined when the data is collected, or in later communications, and will only be used in accordance with the Data Protection legislation in force.

Rights of the individual in relation to personal data held by the Department:

When you, as a customer, provide personal data to the Department you have certain rights available to you in relation to that data. These rights are outlined below and can be exercised by contacting the Data Protection Officer, as detailed above, indicating which right(s) you wish to exercise:

Right of access

Right to rectification

Right to erasure

Right to restrict processing

Right to data portability

Restriction of processing

Data portability

Objection to processing

Withdraw consent if they previously gave it in relation to processing of their personal data relating to automated decision making, including profiling

Make a complaint to the Data Protection Commissioner if you consider that processing of your personal data is contrary to the GDPR.

Complaints to the Commission should be made in writing and addressed to:

Technical Privacy Policy

The Department of Foreign Affairs & Trade respects the rights of its users and does not, as a general rule, collect personal information of any kind from website users.

Where a user voluntarily provides personal information, the data will be used only for the purposes for which it is provided, and not passed to any third party, except where information is specifically provided for use in the case of emergency assistance to Irish citizens overseas.

For general web browsing no personal information is revealed to us, although certain statistical information is available to us via our Internet service provider. This information may include the logical address of the server you are using, the top level domain name from which you access the Internet (for example, .ie, .com, etc), the type of browser you are using, the date and time you access our site and the Internet address used to link to our site.

Some of the above information is used to create summary statistics, which allow us to assess the number of visitors to our site, identify what pages are accessed most frequently. We use these statistics to help us make our site more user friendly.